ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the question of how the Benjaminian self is constructed through a network of looking, this network's implications for the dynamics of power relations, how the photographic camera inserts itself into these power relations, and finally, the self's strategies for avoiding them. Assuming that Benjamin's autobiographical writing is marked by the conflict between a regime of the 'gaze' and a regime of the 'look' that determines the conception of selfhood in Berliner Kindheit, the following two discussion. The first is focuses on the 'Blickraum der Photographie' and its effects on the subject who enters it. The second is concentrates on the process of the erasure of this 'Blickraum' and analyses the 'Bildraum' the text eventually offers instead. The successive disappearance of Benjamin's photographic self-portrait in the process of continuous modifications of Berliner Kindheit finds its mise-en-abime in the story of the Chinese painter with that 'Die Mummerehlen' concludes.
